Who knows what lurks in the hearts of men? For topics ranging from the broadest of human experience: politics, literature, culture, and general observations of great interest to the modern reader. The Nightwatchman knows...

Saturday, October 18, 2008

ME, ME, ME....

Hello! Thanks for stopping in. Pull up a red velvet wing-backed chair and pour yourself another generous snifter of brandy, while I bore you to death with the details of my long, sad life. My full name is Michael Robert Gillham, and I was born in 1983 in a tiny shit-kicking outpost in middle-of-nowhere Wyoming. My father was a fly-by-nighter whose name I don't know and face I'd never recognize. My mother came from hearty frontier stock and had a passion for cross-stitching, Christianity, chores, and the actor stylings of the late Michael Landon. Not long after my birth, my mother met and married a diminutive yet highly efficient civil servant named Larry Gillham (hereafter referred to as "Dad"), whose name I share. They had one son, who is my half-brother a bespectacled, energetic little hobbit named Jason. And we were accompanied by my half-sister, Sheila, who was from an earlier marriage of my mother's and was several years my senior.Early in my life, my mother contracted cervical cancer and we had to move to the bustling metropolis of Salt Lake City, Utah (where I still live) so that she could receive the care she needed. Sadly, she passed away from her illness in the fall of 1988, and only a matter of weeks later, Sheila was killed in a tragic shooting accident. This left Mr. Gillham with the burden of raising Jason and I by himself and with very little help.My dad is an extraordinary parent by any measure. My brother and I ripped each other apart when we were kids and he gave us a very nice home and managed to send us both to a bizarre social experiment that masqueraded as a private high school. On the surface, this school appeared to be a good environment for teenagers; small class sizes, open teaching styles, and strong academics were at all times visible. But, bubbling just beneath the surface, was a conspiracy formulated by the teachers and administration to kill us by subjecting us to backpacking, white-water rafting, and rock climbing in such exotic and dangerous locales as Vietnam, Costa Rica, and Mexico. I was lucky to escape with my life. Others have been less fortunate.From 2003 to 2007 I attended the University of Utah where I graduated with a BA in English with a minor in keg-stands, football stadium vandalism, plagiarism, and napping. That same year I married a smart and sassy lady named Amanda McFarland and we now live near downtown Salt Lake City in our shoebox apartment with a muskrat/chinaman/dog hybrid named Frida Kahlo. I am a devoted libertarian, an atheist, a vegan, an avid swimmer and runner, a man of letters, and a gentleman and PATRIOT, to the last. I like reading, watching TV, wine, beer, sex, profanity, sleeping, and maybe writing if there's still time.

Welcome Friends and Neighbors

Yes, and welcome to the freshest and most innovative of blogs to have traversed the tubes of the internet in recent memory. The Nightwatchman! I am called M., your friend and humble narrator. My dispatch promises the most dizzying of entertainments. Within, we may discuss the pressing issues of the day; matters of the gravest social concern, or we will dissect ad nauseum the vagaries of reality television, Coke v. Pepsi, shark v. bear, man v. nature, which bourbon goes best with which brand of corn chip, reviving the dead for fun and profit. In short, anything goes. Along the way I may even tell you a little about myself. My life as a former college student, and my current life as a slave within the Stygian mines of the American healthcare system. I will also post some of the less than embarrassing attempts at poetry that I have made. I will announce freely my various paranoias, proclamations, exhortations, exaltations, and various free floating hostilities issued from the fattening warmth of my own desktop, and you, yes YOU constant readers will be given every opportunity to answer back in due form. We must not delay any further, take my hand and I will read to you by candlelight the strange and cryptic messages scrawled in an ancient hand by the omniscient and ever-present Nightwatchman who sees all and tells all.